


Manila, 1995

by RiverK



Category: El Mariachi Trilogy (Movies)
Genre: Gen, Pre-Canon, manila, possibly au?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2004-06-14
Updated: 2004-06-14
Packaged: 2020-02-26 01:26:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,575
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18713710
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RiverK/pseuds/RiverK
Summary: A younger, stupider Sands gets a little taste of what's to come





	Manila, 1995

This isn't teh Ev0l Brain-Eating Sandsfic; this is the response to [](https://rhipowered.livejournal.com/profile)[**rhipowered**](https://rhipowered.livejournal.com/) 's challenge. I barely made it past the deadline. *breathes a sigh of relief* I would like very much to thank [](https://ficangel.livejournal.com/profile)[**ficangel**](https://ficangel.livejournal.com/), who beta'd it and put up with my last-minute ultimatum-y thing. *loveloves*

 **Title:** Manila, 1995  
**Rating:** PG-13 for language and violence  
**Disclaimer:** If Sands belonged to me, I'd be dead from Teh Happy and my bed would have collapsed.  
**Feedback:** Yes! Please! *sits up and begs and rolls over and stuff*  
**Summary:** A younger, stupider Sands gets a little taste of what's to come

  
The local president had his mouth firmly latched onto America’s dick, and he was only too happy to suck. Part of the administration’s “economic policy;” probably to make it look prettier after the fiascos that had been the twenty-year dictatorship and the subsequent revolution, and the last administration’s rickety system, the yawning budget deficits, the rebels in Mindanao, and the fact that everyone in the political game was dipping into government funds for their penthouse suites in Makati and their vacations to Paris. Sands knew that it made his job much easier, but he wasn’t too sure he liked it. They let too many of Uncle Sam’s people hang around. There wasn’t as much freedom as Sands would’ve liked; especially since the CIA decided that the local government had something it wasn’t too inclined to disclose to its American guests. So yeah, more co-workers to deal with, more chances of getting caught. That was no fun at all.

Y’know, if they’d asked nicely (and maybe added a few extra zeros to his salary); he would have been more than happy to take care of things himself. Agency wouldn’t have had to worry its pretty little bureaucratic ass about extra field operatives and cleaning up the bodies. Then again, those shitwits up at Langley never really did see the full extent of his potential. So, in light of their grave offense, what was a bullet or two in a few CIA heads, right? “Occupational hazard,” they would probably explain with a shrug. Part of why the game was so much fun. Not that they’d ever find out who it was that planted those bullets in those idiot, government-drone skulls anyway.

What he _did_ get caught for though, was arms dealing. Double-dealing, anyway. You’d think the higher-ups here would be used to getting fucked over and lied to, given all the corruption oozing out of the cracks of this Third World shitheap, but _nooo_. Where was this country’s notoriously sick sense of humor, dammit! As it turned out, around here, everything was an excuse to kill. Everything tasted like lies and coconuts and grit from Manila’s congested streets. And he let it get to him. Which was why he was currently running like all unholy _fuck_ through the unwritten tenth circle of Dante’s hell while men with small brains and large guns took practice shots at the imaginary target pinned to his ass. And hey, guess what? He was out of bullets. Somewhere in this trash mound of a slum, six of his pursuers’ colleagues were donating blood to the gutters. He brought the gun; he forgot the extra cartridge. Lucky for the bastards he’d missed, not so lucky for him.

There had to be a punch line in here somewhere. Preferably one where Sands could be standing over their mangled corpses and giggling like a tickled schoolgirl. But he knew that he couldn’t afford any more unwarranted deaths to his name, even if killing the bald-balled bastards would have probably been regarded as euthanasia, considering the overwhelming clumsiness with which they blundered around his attempted death. Good Christ and shit-eating Judas, he’d given the fuckers plenty of easy opportunities to catch him all throughout their merry little chase through the stinkpit that was Old Manila’s slums –y’know, just for shits and giggles- but not one of them figured it out. And he was getting tired of this particular game.

The bulge in his pocket that was his government-issue cell phone pressed against his sweat-sticky thigh as he ran, and briefly, he considered calling in the cavalry for reinforcements. The shits would probably help the bastards take him out themselves. Or ignore him. Besides, for all his exceptional –albeit severely underrated- spook skills and the CIA-sanctioned diplomatic immunity, officer Sheldon Jeffrey Sands’s conduct records in the Agency were absolute crap. He’d been fucking careless during his first few weeks here. The languid abandon of this country’s sleaze had hit him hard and sweet the moment he arrived.

Since the little operation that had gotten him into all this dick-deep goatshit was completely an on-the-side, under-the-table sort of deal, it wouldn’t look pretty on the track records. He had to be honest here for once; he really didn’t want those records any more tarnished than they already were. Bad for the paycheck.

Furthermore, too much action attracted too many witnesses, and there were plenty of those already.

People should have scattered like surprised bovines, watching pursuers and pursued with rabid interest from a relatively safe distance. But in the narrow, fetid depths of the squatter colony Sands was being chased through, there was barely even enough space to inhale. Running meant colliding. It meant tearing through one-room shacks made of aluminum and shit and the castoffs of a world beyond these yahoos’ reach, and breaking other people’s property without really meaning to. It was their fault for being there. Besides, they soaked in the violence and panic as if the whole thing was some overblown action movie. As if Sands and his pursuers were some flickering glow behind a glass panel. As if they didn’t get enough of this shit everyday and were especially excited because –ooh look! an American with a gun being chased by thugs! Like Arnold Schwarzenegger, only skinnier!

Morons.

Schwarzenegger is Austrian.

Saint Fifi’s cunt, there were so fucking many of them and they were all so fucking stupid, and cutting a path through the imbeciles who didn’t know how to get out of the way was tedious. And he was sick of having his foot plunge into sewage every other step he took.

In this miserable, chaotic labyrinth of human debris, escape was as easy as taking a random turn and ducking. He had been leading these fuckmooks on for so long that he almost believed they could catch him. And that was bad. He had to put a stop to this. Sands careened to a halt and ducked into one of the slum’s numberless dark byways a split-second before bullets rained down on the spot where he had been.

Loud curses muffled by garbage and people and really, _really_ bad music as the five braindead goons chasing him tried to figure out where he went. Sands kept moving. Forward. Because forward was good. And no, he wasn’t lost. Not lost. Not at all.

Now if he could just figure out how to get out of this shit-walled maze and into the nearest McDonald’s... There, he could wallow in multinational American franchise bliss while silently plotting ways to exact his revenge over his quarter pounder with cheese. With fries and coke. Mmyeah, nothing like a little taste of home sweet Hell to leave you with that fuzzy feeling in your gut. There was some measure of satisfaction in knowing that the greatest symbol of America’s mindless consumerism had succeeded in reeling in more customers than any of its local counterparts. Even better if those counterparts were really just sad little carbon copies of the yellow-arched monster that had started it all.

He tore away from the comfort of fast food and shining tiles and hard chairs and corporate neo-imperialism. Back into the here and now, in the hot, dark stench of where you were and the pull of your muscles twitching underneath the strain of pursuit. Duck under a tarpaulin made of cheesecloth and secondhand string before it beheads you, take a turn another turn another. Listen for the traffic. Where? Everywhere, just beyond… beyond.

Sands paused and closed his eyes and tried to cut past the din of life throbbing tenaciously underneath all the scum. Felt rather than heard the rush of air moments before the rough hand closed around his mouth and the gun pressed against the underside of his jaw. Cold against all the slick heat sluicing down his bones. The stink of sweat and flesh and old hate pressed flush against his back. Nicotine and desperation. The gun’s muzzle rubbing against his neck while his captor blindfolded him. Sands’s own gun clattering useless and empty on the hard-packed layer of garbage beneath their feet.

“ _Putang-_!” A half-breed Spanish oath, severed like so much red tape.

Sands smirked as he felt the hot press of flesh against his back and around his neck fall away. He tossed the blindfold –a greasy strip of old denim that stank of armpits- aside and flicked clean the butterfly knife he’d snatched from the bony cocksucker’s belt and then buried into his gut. A balisong, the wooden handle’s grain dark-stained with blood. Worn and sharpened on the bones of assholes like him. The other man’s corpse twitching, piss and shit and gore pooling on the grime, soaking into the dirt. Feeding Manila’s hungry heart.

Sands tossed his head back and laughed out loud. He started running once more. He wasn’t planning on getting caught again.

-End-  



End file.
